Drowning in Her Eyes

by Patrick Ford

  “Daddy?” This was Denni. “Can I come with you, please?” Denni loved horses and did not want to be denied any excuse for a ride.

  “All right, but be careful. Do you want to come, Jack?”

  Jack was not a keen horseman, but he was not going to be embarrassed by his sister. “I’ll come,” he said. In minutes, the men brought up the saddled horses and the little party was on its way. The stragglers stubbornly refused to cross the many small streams and a leader had to be dragged across before the rest would follow, chivvied by the relentless dogs.

  It was after dark by the time they returned to the homestead—wet, mud-splattered, and weary. While Paddy and the men downed large glasses of beer, Helen hustled off Denni and Jack to bathe and change. Later that night, Jack confided in his sister. “I like living here,” he began, “but I don’t think I want to run the station. What I would really like to do is become a soldier.”

  “Don’t be a dill,” said Denni. “Dad won’t let that happen. You’re destined to come home here, and don’t forget it.”

  “What about you? You’re the eldest.”

  “Running the station is a man’s job. I am going to marry a rich man and live in the city. You can come to visit if you like.”

  When you are ten years old, you don’t have much say in anything. Jack kept his own counsel, but his ambition still smouldered away inside.

  * * * *

  Australia is a land of wildly variable climate. As one of her famous poets described it: ‘a sunburnt country…a land of droughts and flooding rains.’ Old hands say all floods end with the beginning of a drought. Ballinrobe had benefitted from the good season, but wool prices—driven to record heights by the demand for warm clothing during the Korean War—had ebbed away. Paddy had been looking for a long time for another enterprise to increase profit and spread risk. He had noticed that wheat prices were strong, and with the world demand for food increasing as Europe and Japan rose, Phoenix-like from the ashes of the war, they looked set to be high for some considerable time.

  “Helen,” he said one night, “I think we should be clearing some of our better land and turning it over to wheat growing.”

  Helen had discussed this with him before. A naturally cautious woman, still mindful of the Great Depression through which her family had struggled, she had an aversion to risk and especially to borrowing money. “How will you do this, Paddy? I hope we won’t have to borrow too much money. It will cost a lot to buy tractors and things, and won’t you have to employ more men?”

  “I think we can handle it with Mick and Ollie. Anyway it won’t be all that long until Jack is home earning his keep.” Helen said nothing. She had ambitions for Jack, including a University education. That would add a further three or four years to his absence. She knew her son, as mothers do, and she was not at all certain he would be coming home to take over the management of Ballinrobe.

  Chapter 2

  Far Horizons

  Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA—1957

  Albuquerque, New Mexico is about two thousand miles from Boston. The Baker family rode the rails. There would be a new Chevrolet waiting for them there. It was an exciting time for them all, to see so much of their country. The train passed through the northeast, down through New York and Baltimore to Washington, DC, then across to Chicago and south through the Mid-west to Albuquerque. The journey was broken several times to visit cities and landmarks alike.

  “Take your time, Jimmy,” said Bob Phillips. “You have a big job waiting for you, and you need a vacation. Give the family a good look at our great country, and, remember, Worcester Electronic is picking up the check.”

  It had been quite a journey, starting with the family meeting when Jimmy reached home and delivered his news. It was not greeted with overwhelming joy. Marci was concerned for her family, particularly her aging mother. She had other siblings to look after her, but Marci was closer to her mother than the others were. Susan was happy to move, despite leaving her friends behind. At eleven, on the cusp of puberty, she had demonstrated a remarkable serenity when confronting problems in her life. Wherever her father went, she was happy to go. She was looking forward to meeting new people and having new adventures. Secretly, she believed she had outgrown Worcester.

  Sarah was the least inclined to move. She did not want to lose her friends, including a new boyfriend. James Junior wanted to go. He got out the encyclopedia and checked out New Mexico. “Do they really have cowboys and Indians out there, Dad?”

  “They sure do, Jimbo, real cowboys and Indians. It’s a lot warmer than it is in Worcester, too.” The cowboys and Indians were enough to sway the boy. He had visions of a warm and sunny clime where he could play baseball every day of the year.

  Jimmy addressed them all: “Look, this is the best thing that could have happened to us. It will mean more money. We can have a second car, and we can look forward to giving you all a college education. I think we should go.”

  “I don’t want a college education,” spoke up James Junior. “I just want to be a cowboy!”

  In the end, they all agreed to give New Mexico a chance. Marci had one condition. She would not hear of selling their home in Worcester. “I want to know we have a home we can return to if anything goes wrong,” she said. “We own this house and it will be our home again one day. Mark my words!” She wasn’t to know how prophetic that statement would be.

  The new factory was almost finished; Jimmy only had to complete the organisation. Art and Chris were as good as their word and dispatched a quartet of office staff for his deployment. A tall and somewhat fearsome woman named Margaret Allenby, former executive officer of an Army hospital in the Pacific, took charge and soon she had the place running smoothly. Despite her forbidding appearance, she had a soft centre, but she would stand no nonsense. Jimmy referred to her (out of her hearing, of course), as the Master Sergeant.

  The children settled into Albuquerque with little difficulty. Susan and Sarah went to school at Las Lunas High School, where they quickly integrated with their new classmates. Susan found everything about her new State interesting. There was a significant Mexican component, and she found their culture—along with that of the Pueblo Indians—engrossing. It wasn’t long before she was arriving for breakfast with the greeting: “¿Hola Madre y familia. Como estas?” Her mother was not impressed, but Jimmy encouraged her, reckoning a second language might come in handy one day.

  Sarah was moody at times, but as she met more friends and more boys, her natural cheerfulness reasserted itself. Meantime, the letters to her boyfriend in Worcester diminished gradually until they petered out altogether. Finally, she confided in Susan: “I don’t think about Mike anymore. Besides, there are plenty of great guys here close by!”

  Susan had felt the stirring of her womanhood, but she found her school friends a little too puerile for her liking. Always a serious girl, she did not want to languish in the ‘leave school, get married, have kids, and be a dutiful wife’ scenario most of her friends expected. Deep down, she wanted to see a great deal more of the world.

  James Junior loved the place. Compared to Worcester, it was a mild climate, with temperatures rarely falling below freezing and it hardly ever snowed. He soon had a posse of little friends lining up after school for his mother’s chocolate brownies. In his opinion, he was well on the way to becoming the new Babe Ruth.

  They had arrived in late February, as spring was making itself felt, and in time for numerous dance festivals at the Indian pueblos. Soon, caught up in all the activity of their schools and other social affairs, no one thought much of the Worcester they had left behind.

  Jimmy was busy at the factory. As the cold war grew more serious, there was no let up with orders. More contracts flowed in and he had to increase his workforce by thirty percent. Many were Latinos, and he found he was often calling on Susan after school for assistance as a translator, for she had become almost fluent in Spanish, including many not-so-nice words the meaning of which she was lar
gely unaware. Almost without notice, the years rolled on until 1962, when a series of events was to pitch the family headlong into turmoil.

  Goondiwindi, Queensland, Australia—1958

  Away to the east, the sky was showing the first traces of dawn. Under a pale slice of mid-winter sky, a pink flush heralded another day. Paddy and young Jack huddled together in the open Land Rover. This was becoming an almost daily event, necessary to protect the wheat crop from marauding kangaroos and feral pigs. Jack had learned to shoot at the age of eight with an old Winchester .22 single shot rifle. He soon mastered the weapon and moved on to better things, but the old single shot had taught him a valuable lesson. When you have only one shot, you have to make it count.

  Despite Australia having a reputation as a hot and semi-arid country, winters can be cold. Here in the middle of July, they had watched the frost forming on windscreen and hood as dawn approached. Jack was wearing an old army surplus woolen battledress blouse. He was proud of this military relic. It still had Corporal’s chevrons on the sleeves along with the yellow and red shoulder flash of the Royal Australian Armoured Corps. He loved the jacket, almost as much as he loved the olive-green Land Rover, because it so closely resembled a military vehicle. He often drove it through the scrub, making believe he was on patrol. His military ambition had not waned.

  Jack cradled a sporting rifle in his arms. It was a beautiful example of the gunsmith’s art. Manufactured in Finland by Sako and chambered in .243 centre fire, it had beautiful balance and amazing accuracy. This one sported a Parker Hale six-power telescopic sight that had been a recent birthday gift. Paddy favoured an old Lee Enfield Mark 3 .303 military rifle. Tried and proven in two world wars, it was reliable and packed a decent punch. Its best feature was its ten-round magazine, twice the ammunition Jack had.

  The sky was lightening now. Where they had parked the Land Rover, in a small clump of Wilga trees, near the stock watering point, they were downwind of the wheat field and not visible to the kangaroos.

  Paddy grunted: “I can see the bastards, mate, to our left and about a hundred yards away.”

  Jack could see them now, a mob of around twenty, guarded by a big buck on the left flank. “OK, Dad, you start on the right, I’ll take the left. On the count of three…” On cue, the rifles shattered the peaceful morning. A great cloud of pink and grey galahs rose from the crop’s edge and spiraled into the rapidly lightening sky. Jack saw his father’s first shot knock over a ‘roo and then he had no time to worry about anything other than his own targets. He saw his first mark, the big buck, bound into the air and go down like a sack of grain dropped from the back of a truck. He quickly switched his target to the next in line. Before he could squeeze the trigger, he saw, in his peripheral vision, something that made him hesitate. Low to the ground, he had spotted four large feral pigs bolting for the cover of the scrub.

  Feral pigs are the bane of Australian agriculture. Descended from escaped or abandoned domestic animals, they are large and dangerous. They are omnivores and they will eat anything they can catch or find. They cause massive destruction to crops, from sugar cane to cereals, rooting in the ground and knocking over many acres in their wasteful search for food. They despoil water holes, turning them into muddy wallows where sheep and cattle cannot drink. They kill and eat young lambs, and even calves. Their reproductive rate is high. Each sow will have several litters a year, each containing up to ten piglets. If a mother is shot, or dies, her piglets are sometimes taken over by another lactating sow that would rear them. They are cunning and difficult to bait.

  All of this flashed through Jack’s subconscious mind. Almost automatically, he followed all four with his telescopic sight. Four shots rang out and four pigs tumbled to their deaths in the wheat, giving a final kick of their hind legs as the life drained from them. Jack stood there, finding it hard to believe what had happened. In some kind of fog, he realised what a feat of controlled shooting he had just performed—four moving targets, partly obscured, with four rounds from a bolt-action rifle at a range of around one hundred yards. He knew he was a good shot, but not that good. He came back to the present to find Paddy looking at him in amazement.

  ‘Bugger me,” said his father, “how did you bloody do that?”

  “I don’t know, Dad. It was kind of instinctive, as though something took control of me for the moment. I didn’t even hear your rifle once it started.”

  “I’ve never seen shooting like that, but from a twelve-year-old kid, it’s ridiculous. Good on ya, mate.”

  Jack swelled with pride. His father’s approval was the ultimate praise to him, because he loved this big tough bushman with all his being. He said nothing, ambition to wear his country’s uniform only reinforced by the morning’s action. His father was still looking at him in bewilderment. What sort of a son did he have here? Anyway, it looked as if Ballinrobe would be in good hands. He looked across the crop, standing eighteen inches high and just starting to come into head. It stretched for almost a mile in every direction. Just one good fall of rain, and the crop would be a beauty. He turned back to his son.

  “Righto, we better skin these ‘roos and get home before your mother burns the breakfast. She’s not gonna believe what you’ve just done!”

  Paddy was no mean shot himself—six humped grey forms lay on the ground. They skinned them all. Later, Jack would peg the skins out to cure. By winter’s end, he would have a nice stock of pelts for the visiting skin buyer. They also loaded a pile of fresh meat for the dogs. They drove home in silence, replete with their victory over the pests.

  Jack drove. He had learned to drive the Land Rover by the age of ten, taking a while to master its crash gearbox and indifferent brakes. Now he was an expert, in wet or dry conditions. As they approached the last gate before the homestead, Paddy turned to Jack and said, “Mate, I’ll bloody well miss you next year when you kids are off to boarding school.”

  Jack did not like that prospect at all. Despite his yen to be a soldier, he had come to love life at Ballinrobe and could not imagine not being there. Still, he hoped to taste the military life before settling down. He hoped his father would be understanding and patient when the time came to confront him about it.

  Worcester, Massachusetts, USA—1962

  Worcester looked different in the early fall. Robed in the reds, yellows and browns of its deciduous trees, it was a pretty sight as they drove in from Boston. It was too bad they were returning on such a sad note. The city had grown, too. New suburbs stood where farmers’ fields had been a short time before. Jimmy Baker knew it was a story writ large across America. Post-war prosperity had made a good life for many. Russia had become less bellicose, and tensions appeared to be receding all around the world.

  Jimmy had come home to a dark and depressed household. Tearfully, Marci hugged him. “Oh, Jimmy, Mom has passed away. I am just so sorry I was not there.” Jimmy did his best to console her and the children. James Junior was the least affected. His Grandmother had been absent from his short life for most of it. He dutifully dispatched birthday and Christmas cards, but he had not really known her. The girls were sad, but they knew about the inevitability of death and understood that Grandma’s time had come. Susan had not found Grandma to be such a nice person, anyway. She remembered all the narrow minded remarks about Negros and Latinos, things she now knew were evidence of a bitter old woman lashing out.

  Sarah retained her obsession with the opposite sex, and her Grandmother’s demise was just an inconvenience. These teenage crushes were fleeting, but ever so dramatic when they were happening. Sarah had even confessed to having sex with one of the boys.

  Susan—now almost seventeen and just about to complete High School—did not know whether to be envious or horrified. “For God’s sake, don’t let Mom find out. She’ll kill you,” she burst out. “Remember that pep talk at the start of the year?”

  Marci, realising her girls were fast metamorphosing into two beautiful young women, had read the riot act about boys, p
re-marital sex, and unwanted pregnancies. She left them in no doubt that transgressions in certain areas would bring down the wrath of God upon them. She was especially scornful of girls who got into trouble and intimated that, if such a thing happened, the perpetrator would be most unwelcome in her home.

  The funeral was in a small Episcopalian Church surrounded by the beautiful colours of autumn. As Susan followed the cortege into the small churchyard to the family plot, she looked up at a leaden sky. Long flights of Canada geese were arrowing their way south and she could feel the chill of the approaching winter. She experienced a queer thought. Every funeral should be on days like this, she mused; it makes the whole thing so appropriate.

  After the graveside service, they all gathered at an Aunt’s house. Aunt Sophie was Marci’s older sister and had been caring for her mother, first at her home and later at the nursing home. This was not a happy gathering; a gloomy atmosphere pervaded the place. After politely acknowledging the adults, Susan and Sarah wandered outside to mix with the other teenagers, several of whom were their cousins.

  Susan was thinking about the funerals of relatives of her classmates. Brian Murphy told her about Irish Catholics and the wakes that followed the funerals. “Everyone gets sloshed, they sing and dance. They tell stories about the dead guy, and there is a marvelous amount of food and drink,” he said. “It’s more like a party, a fond farewell to a friend and loved one.” Lola Suarez had told her a similar tale of the Mexican services. Perhaps it was a matter of their religion, both groups being Catholic. Marci did not like Catholics, branding them as too fond of the drink and loath to accept personal responsibility. Sometimes, Susan thought, Mom sounds just like Grandma.